Between the Drama Text and the Theatre Text

About the event

The round table will be dedicated to a thorough examination of the relationships, changes and shifts between the notions of a drama text and a theatre text: we will systematically question their ontological, aesthetic, epistemological and functional differences. The starting point for our debate will be the understanding of a drama text as a literary genre that establishes its own autonomy through language, composition, inner dramaturgy, and the relationship between the spoken, the unspoken, and the written, independently of concrete staging realisations. In this context, we shall think about the drama text as a bearer of literary value that also functions outside the theatre event, in the realms of reading, reflection and history. 

In the continuation, we will focus on contemporary theatre writing that often emerges as processual, hybrid or collective writing and eschews the classical concepts of authorship, dramatic structure and fictional coherence. We will look at the theatre text as an open score, a dispositif or an archive of staging indelibly linked to a specific time, space and the performers’ bodies. The debate seeks to clarify whether the distinction between drama text and theatre text remains today an operational analytical category, or is it a historically conditioned division that contemporary theatre practices have been loosening, moving and conceptually disintegrating.

Moderator: Simona Semenič

Participants: Associate professor Zala Dobovšek, PhD, Associate professor Žiga Divjak, Urša Majcen and Professor Krištof Jacek Kozak, PhD

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